dinsdag 31 december 2013

Glenn Greenwald: The NSA Can "Literally Watch Every Keystroke You Make"

TOPICS

GUESTS

Glenn Greenwald, is the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden. He was previously a columnist at The Guardiannewspaper and is creating a new media venture with Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

Jameel Jaffer, American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director and director of its Center for Democracy.

The German publication Der Spiegel has revealed new details about a secretive hacking unit inside the National Security Agency called the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. The unit was created in 1997 to hack into global communications traffic. Hackers inside the TAO have developed a way to break into computers running Microsoft Windows by gaining passive access to machines when users report program crashes to Microsoft. In addition, with help from the CIA and FBI, the NSAhas the ability to intercept computers and other electronic accessories purchased online in order to secretly insert spyware and components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies. American Civil Liberties Union Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer and journalist Glenn Greenwald join us to discuss the latest revelations, along with the future of Edward Snowden.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org,The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation about the National Security Agency. On Sunday, the German publication Der Spiegelrevealed new details about secretive hacking—a secretive hacking unit inside the NSA called the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. The unit was created in 1997 to hack into global communications traffic. Still with us, Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, director of the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, and Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden. Glenn, can you just talk about the revelations in Der Spiegel?

GLENNGREENWALD: Sure. I think everybody knows by now, or at least I hope they do after the last seven months reporting, that the goal of the NSA really is the elimination of privacy worldwide—not hyperbole, not metaphor, that’s literally their goal, is to make sure that all human communications that take place electronically are collected and then stored by the NSA and susceptible to being monitored and analyzed. But the specifics are still really important to illustrate just the scope and invasiveness and the dangers presented by this secret surveillance system.

And what the Der Spiegel article details is that one of the things that the NSA is really adept at doing is implanting in various machines—computers, laptops, even cellphones and the like—malware. And malware is essentially a program that allows theNSA, in the terminology that hackers use, to own the machine. So, no matter how much encryption you use, no matter how much you safeguard your communication with passwords and other things, this malware allows the NSA to literally watch every keystroke that you make, to get screen captures of what it is that you’re doing, to circumvent all forms of encryption and other barriers to your communications.

And one of the ways that they’re doing it is that they intercept products in transit, such as if you order a laptop or other forms of Internet routers or servers and the like, they intercept it in transit, open the box, implant the malware, factory-seal it and then send it back to the user. They also exploit weaknesses in Google and YouTube and Yahoo and other services, as well, in order to implant these devices. It’s unclear to what extent, if at all, the companies even know about it, let alone cooperate in it. But what is clear is that they’ve been able to compromise the physical machines themselves, so that it makes no difference what precautions you take in terms of safeguarding the sanctity of your online activity.

AMYGOODMAN: So, I mean, just to be really specific, you order a computer, and it’s coming UPS, or it’s coming FedEx, and they have it redirected to their own—you know, to the NSA, and they put in the malware, the spyware, and then send it on to you?

Unless we reform the system, economic inequality will expand and the American people will experience far greater competition globally as teams of people and machines compete to produce and sell their products and services at the lowest possible cost.

In recent weeks, there have been numerous excellent articles addressing the scope of problems related to our dependency on job creation as the ONLY source of income. But universally, the authors are oblivious to the non-job-dependent solution. Simply extending jobless benefits once again won't solve the problem of long-term unemployment and underemployment and the diminishing impact income losses have on the long-term productive capacity of the U.S. economy.

The common thread of articles that address unemployment and underemployment are solutions that would build an American society of dependent citizens on tax extraction and national debt to provide social insurance. While social insurance is certainly an emergency measure that requires implementation, it should not be seen as a panacea. The real task is to change the culture, from one of wanting or lacking personal responsibility and dependency on the “State,” into one where our human nature can be sustained and advanced through a private property ownership mentality, pursuing individual virtue.

We need to transform the present credo, as advocated by progressive political leaders and others, from one of servitude and dependency to one of personal responsibility and sustainability by means of broadening wealth creating income-producing private property ownership by EVERY citizen of the productive capital (non-human) means of production. Private property ownership is the cornerstone of American liberty. Without it our free enterprise system, our free markets and our republican form of self-government cannot endure. Nor can we prosper without the equal opportunity to acquire capital ownership financed by its own earnings. We need to pursue policies that will strengthen the economic position of the individual, the family and the local community with decreasing reliance on government welfare support financed by tax extraction and national debt.

While emergency assistance is necessary in the interim, the contributors and references cited in numerous articles are ALLone-factor thinkers: LABOR ONLY!—with a focus on wages rather than income and "full employment" rather than "full production" as the economy's panacea. They all are stuck in the labor only idea that ALL WEALTH is created by human labor. The reality is that less and less human labor is necessary to produce wealth. If that is the case, then ownership of the non-human means of production is necessary if one desires to be wealthy and affluent. Ownership is the key to providing sufficient income purchasing power not JOBS alone.

The political maneuvering in Washington is directed at benefiting the wealthy capital ownership class not the average person on "Main Street." Such policies, as are pursued, will further concentrate ownership of wealth-creating, income-producing productive capital assets among the 1 to 5 percent of the American population and further enhance the economic and political power of the wealthy ownership class.

The root cause of present injustices is the fact that the mass of people are practically bereft of ownership of wealth-creating, income producing productive capital. Policy objectives need to result in universally admitting the proletariats within the proprietary system. Widely distributed property ownership makes for social stability. All the solutions offered by the contributors and their references in the breadth of articles now published lacks the moral discipline of responsibility and ownership and instead argues for a collective “State” approach to replace our private property-based American system.

No longer is the American economy labor-intensive with opportunity for jobs that strengthen the middle class. The new challenge is structuring the economy to empower EVERY citizen to benefit from technological advancement. Technological change makes tools, machines, structures, and processes ever more productive while leaving human productiveness largely unchanged (our human abilities are limited by physical strength and brain power––and relatively constant). The technology industry is always changing, evolving and innovating. As a result, the trend has been to diminish the importance of employment with productive capital ownership concentrating faster than ever, while technological change makes capital ever more productive.

Bottom line: technology is an easier and faster way to get a job done.

Because technology increases the profitability of companies throughout the world, technology always has the advantage over human labor when the costs of them are the same. Digital automated systems now replace many middle management and many manual jobs. At some point, the traditional jobs at the bottom of the economic pyramid paying low wages will become automated. This will result in more and more people chasing fewer and fewer jobs. At some point the issue of earning a living will become problematic for the American economy and those contributors and their references will have to address the issue of concentrated ownership as productive capital will obviate most jobs as we know them to be now.

Sadly, the system is rigged by the wealthy ownership class to manipulate the lives of people who struggle with declining labor worker earnings and job opportunities, and then accumulate the bulk of the money through monopolized productive capital ownership. Our scientists, engineers, and executive managers who are not owners themselves, except for those in the highest employed positions, are encouraged to work to destroy employment by making the capital "worker" owner more productive. How much employment can be destroyed by substituting machines for people is a measure of their success—always focused on producing at the lowest cost. Only the people who already own productive capital are the beneficiaries of their work, as they systematically concentrate more and more capital ownership in their stationary 1 to 5 percent ranks.

The reality is that personal and family household income for those who are dependent on a job as their ONLY income source is declining. Wage and salary incomes will continue to decline simultaneously with global competition and, as a result of the necessity to turn to increasingly more productive non-human means of production and destruction of jobs that will become unnecessary and devalue the worth of labor.

Full employment is not an objective of businesses. Companies strive to keep labor input and other costs at a minimum in order to maximize profits for the owners. Private sector job creation in numbers that match the pool of people willing and able to work is constantly being eroded by physical productive capital’s ever increasing role. This will not change with companies realizing that they can operate more efficiently with fewer employees. Therefore, unless the employees are owners, the share of corporate profits going to the employees will continue to decline.

But because this is not well understood, what we as a society have been doing is to continually shift the work burden from human labor to real capital while distributing the earning capacity of capital “workers” (via capital ownership of stock in corporations) to non-owners through jobs and welfare. Such policies do not function effectively.

Thus, the primary distribution through the free market economy, whose distributive principle is “to each according to his production,” delivers progressively more market-sourced income to capital owners and progressively less to workers who make their contribution through labor.

Unfortunately, ever since the 1946 passage of the Full Employment Act, economists and politicians formulating national economic policy have beguiled us into believing that economic power is democratically distributed if we have full employment—thus the political focus on job creation and redistribution of wealth rather than on full production and broader capital ownership accumulation. This is manifested in the belief that labor work is the ONLY way to participate in production and earn income even though EVERY wealthy person and family knows that capital incomes can be far greater than wage incomes. Long ago labor work was prime because labor provided 95 percent of the input into the production of products and services. But today that is not true. Capital provides not less than 90 to 95 percent of the input.

Full employment, as the means to distribute income, is not achievable. When capital "workers" (productive capital owners) replace labor workers (non-capital owners) as the principal suppliers of products and services, labor employment alone becomes inadequate. Thus, we are left with government policies that redistribute income in one form or another including unemployment benefits and other social insurance programs.

Conventional economists, political leaders and the national media are oblivious to the structural problems that plague our economy, especially with respect to the ways the system further concentrates ownership of wealth-creating, income-producing productive capital assets and growth among the already wealthy ownership class, which represents 1 to 5 percent of the population. With such concentrated economic power, the American majority is barred from participating in the ownership of the non-human factor assets that are doing the bulk of the production of products and services, leaving them with their ONLY income source a job or welfare. Thus they are shut out from a most significant income source to effectively empower them to be "customers with money" and propel economic demand, and thus real productive growth of the economy.

There is a way out if the Federal Reserve System can be reformed to act as a purveyor of economic growth.

Right now the Federal Reserve creates money by loaning it to banks, who re-loan it multiple times because of fractional banking rules. With Capital Homesteading, money would be created by loaning it directly to citizens using insured capital credit loans via banks at near-zero interest to invest in FUTURE wealth-creating, income-generating (full dividend payout) productive capital assets formed by producer companies. To build real wealth and also phase out our near-defunct social security scheme, the new full-reserve money would go into a long-term retirement account (a super IRA) to be invested in dividend-paying, asset-backed shares of diversified corporations. That way, money power would be spread to all citizens. The middle class would be invigorated using the principle of compounding interest, instead of being decimated by mushrooming public and personal debt.

In this way, the Federal Reserve could play a more positive role, removing artificial barriers to equal citizen access to acquiring and owning productive capital wealth. By creating asset-backed money for production, supported by growth-oriented tax policies, the Federal Reserve could truly help promote shared prosperity in a market system.

Wealth creation needs to benefit EVERY citizen. Virtually all the economic gains have pertained to the wealthy ownership class within the top 1 to 5 percent of the population, who own the vast wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital assets of American corporations.

Unless we reform the system, economic inequality will expand and the American people will experience far greater competition globally as teams of people and machines compete to produce and sell their products and services at the lowest possible cost. This means that we must look to increasing the productiveness of technological innovation and invention.

The reality is that more and more people are being squeezed financially, faced with dismal job prospects (their only source of income) and on the blink of having to turn to the government for unemployment benefits, welfare support and other social insurance programs funded by tax extraction and national debt. Americans, for the most part, are in a mode of retrenchment even though they have tremendous pent-up demand and unfulfilled dreams for a more affluent life, which they see enjoyed by the wealthy ownership class (without realizing that those people are wealthy because they OWN).

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ABOUT GARY REBER

Gary Reber is the founder and Executive Director of For Economic Justice (www.foreconomicjustice.org), and an advocate and author for economic justice through broadened ownership of productive capital. Mr. Reber is a member of the Coalition for Capital Homesteading. Mr. Reber founded with binary economist Louis Kelso, Agenda 2000 Incorporated in 1967 to advocate policies and programs to broaden productive capital ownership in urban development projects. Mr. Reber studied economic development planning at the University of Cincinnati, University of California, Berkeley, with doctorate studies at the University of Stockholm and Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. In addition to other publications, Mr. Reber, for the past 22 years, also has published Widescreen Review, an enthusiast home theatre magazine and Webzine (www.widescreenreview.com) as well as Ultimate Home Design, a “green” sustainable movement magazine, now on the Web (www.ultimatehomedesign.com), and is a producer of high-definition concert video specials. Mr. Reber testified March 7, 8, 9, 1973 as President of the Institute for the Pursuit of Economic Justice before The Committee On Ways And Means House Of Representatives––Ninety-Third Congress––On The Subject Of General Tax Reform.

Some conservatives continue to claim that President Obama is unfriendly to business, but the facts show that the richest Americans and the biggest businesses have been the main—perhaps only—beneficiaries of the massive wealth gain over the past five years.

Anyone reviewing the data is likely to conclude that there must be some mistake. It doesn't seem possible that one out of twenty American families could each have made a million dollars since Obama became President, while the average American family's net worth has barely recovered. But the evidence comes from numerous reputable sources.

Some conservatives continue to claim that President Obama is unfriendly to business, but the facts show that the richest Americans and the biggest businesses have been the main—perhaps only—beneficiaries of the massive wealth gain over the past five years.

1. $5 Million to Each of the 1 percent, and $1 Million to Each of the Next 4 percent

From the end of 2008 to the middle of 2013 the total U.S. wealth increased from $47 trillion to $72 trillion. And about $16 trillion of that is financial gain (stocks and other financial instruments).

The richest 1 percent own about 38 percent of stocks and half of are non-stock financial assets. So they've gained at least $6.1 trillion (38 percent of $16 trillion). That's over $5 million for each of 1.2 million households.

The next richest 4 percent, based on similar calculations, gained about $5.1 trillion. That's over a million dollars for each of their 4.8 million households.

The least wealthy 90 percent in our country only own 11 percent of all stocks excluding pensions, which are fastly disappearing. The frantic recent surge in the stock market has largely bypassed these families.

2. Evidence of Our Growing Wealth Inequality

This first fact is nearly ungraspable: In 2009 the average wealth for almost half of American families was ZERO (their debt exceeded their assets).

In 1983, the families in America's poorer half owned an average of about $15,000. But from 1983 to 1989 the median wealth fell from more than $70,000 to about $60,000. From 1998 to 2009, about 80 percent of American families LOST wealth and they had to borrow as a way to stay afloat.

It seems the disparity couldn't get much worse, but after the recession, it did. According to a Pew Research Center study, in the first two years of recovery the mean net worth of households in the upper 7 percent of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28 percent, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93 percent dropped by 4 percent. And then, from 2011 to 2013, the stock market grew by almost 50 percent with again the great majority of that gain going to the richest 5 percent.

Today our wealth gap is worse than that of third-world economies. Out of all developed and undeveloped countries with at least a quarter-million adults, the U.S. has the 4th-highest degree of wealth inequality in the world trailing only Russia, Ukraine and Lebanon.

3. Congress' Solution: Take from the Poor

Congress has responded by cutting unemployment benefits and food stamps along with other “sequester” targets like Meals on Wheels for seniors and Head Start for preschoolers. The more the super-rich make, the more they seem to believe in the cruel fantasy that the poor are to blame for their own struggles.

President Obama recently proclaimed that inequality "drives everything I do in this office." Indeed it may, but in the wrong direction.

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ABOUT PAUL BUCHHEIT

Paul Buchheit is a college teacher with formal training in language development and cognitive science. He is the founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, RappingHistory.org, PayUpNow.org), and the editor and main author of "American Wars: Illusions and Realities" (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.

Postmodern irony and cynicism become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage… The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.

make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit ‘I don’t really mean what I’m saying.’ So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: ‘How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.’

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

‘Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.’ This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly funny to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing by trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow oppressed.

In a move that would thwart the reported 'security arrangements' in John Kerry’s draft peace proposal, a committee of Israeli government ministers today approved new legislation to annex the occupied Jordan Valley.

ISTANBUL — “Iran is the center of terrorism, fundamentalism and subversion and is in my view more dangerous than Nazism, because Hitler did not possess a nuclear bomb, whereas the Iranians are trying to perfect a nuclear option.”Benjamin Netanyahu 2009? Try again. These words were in fact uttered by another Israeli prime minister (and now Israeli president), Shimon Peres, in 1996. Four years earlier, in 1992, he’d predicted that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999.You can’t accuse the Israelis of not crying wolf. Ehud Barak, now defense minister, said in 1996 that Iran would be producing nuclear weapons by 2004.Now here comes Netanyahu, in an interview with his faithful stenographer Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, spinning the latest iteration of Israel’s attempt to frame Iran as some Nazi-like incarnation of evil:“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”I must say when I read those words about “the wide-eyed believer” my mind wandered to a recently departed “decider.” But I’m not going there.

The issue today is Iran and, more precisely, what President Barack Obama will make of Netanyahu’s prescription that, the economy aside, Obama’s great mission is “preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons” — an eventuality newly inscribed on Israeli calendars as “months” away.I’ll return to the ever shifting nuclear doomsday in a moment, but first that Netanyahu interview.This “messianic apocalyptic cult” in Tehran is, of course, the very same one with which Israel did business during the 1980’s, when its interest was in weakening Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. That business — including sales of weapons and technology — was an extension of Israeli policy toward Iran under the shah.It’s also the same “messianic apocalyptic cult” that has survived 30 years, ushered the country from the penury of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, shrewdly extended its power and influence, cooperated with America on Afghanistan before being consigned to “the axis of evil,” and kept its country at peace in the 21st century while bloody mayhem engulfed neighbors to east and west and Israel fought two wars.I don’t buy the view that, as Netanyahu told Goldberg, Iran is “a fanatic regime that might put its zealotry above its self-interest.” Every scrap of evidence suggests that, on the contrary, self-interest and survival drive the mullahs.Yet Netanyahu insists (too much) that Iran is “a country that glorifies blood and death, including its own self-immolation.” Huh?On that ocular theme again, Netanyahu says Iran’s “composite leadership” has “elements of wide-eyed fanaticism that do not exist in any other would-be nuclear power in the world.” No, they exist in an actual nuclear power, Pakistan.Israel’s nuclear warheads, whose function is presumably deterrence of precisely powers like Iran, go unmentioned, of course.'